As long as you are learning, its all OK. I should kick myself for all the stupid trades I have been making lately. It is the curse of boredom in a sideways trading market that leads me to lower my standards, and the lack of time to do proper research. Looks like a fine collection of shit stained hats in our future.

I feel the pain!! How it hurts to watch a stock do that when you don't own any shares! Interestingly though, it traded over 40 million shares today and 50 million last week... that is 60% of the company trading hands in only a few days! I'm always interested in the new dynamics of trading after this many shares exchange hands.

This is exactly the situation I was in with CCME. "No, its probably just a short selling conspiracy".

2 things give protection to the writer of the report.

1) It probably doesn't use any false information. Just spins the truth in a bad light2) There is probably a heavy disclaimer somewhere in the website and report

Similarly, Intertainment hasn't really done anything wrong. They are probably overstating the potential for the company, but that is just an incredibly successful marketing campaign, not fraud.

So you are left now with doubt. But, you start to ask questions that you don't want to answer in the case that you own the stock and are underwater. Is translation software really that big a deal? Doesn't Outlook or Google translator already have pretty much the same thing already? In the end, with CCME I found that the short sellers were right and I totally ignored their reasonability check in favour of "evidence" that everything was OK in the financial statements.

General lesson learned from the past was not to ignore the warning signs. Short sellers are not stupid, and will probably not jump on a stock primed to rise 200% or more for no reason while paying interest the whole time they wait for their theory to play out.